The San Antonio Spurs announced today that Becky Hammon will join the team’s coaching staff as an assistant coach for the upcoming season.

Hammon is retiring this year after playing 16 seasons in the WNBA. And she’s had a pretty good run: She was named one of the WNBA’s top 15 players of all time in July of 2011.

"I very much look forward to the addition of Becky Hammon to our staff," Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said in a statement Tuesday. "Having observed her working with our team this past season, I'm confident her basketball IQ, work ethic and interpersonal skills will be a great benefit to the Spurs."

In a conference call with the media, Hammon said that time spent with the Spurs last season was a kind of internship while she was recovering from a knee injury. And the experience helped the team realize Hammon would be a good addition to the Spurs’ coaching staff.

“[The Spurs] think outside the box,” Hammon said. “This just happens to be a situation where they’ve been observing me for eight years playing down here, and last year I’ve done kind of an internship with them, if you will, and they said, ‘OK, this could work.’”

Hammon, 37, was a three-time All-American at Colorado State before she signed with the New York Liberty in May of 1999. She stayed with the Liberty for eight seasons before being traded to the San Antonio Stars in 2007, where she has been ever since.

Hammon said her body was telling her to retire from playing basketball. Once the decision was made to step away from the game after a string of injuries, she debated entering sports broadcasting or the coaching world.